Twenty-One Stories

  He turned away to look for another chair where he could exhibit himself discreetly: the select tie, the tan, the grey distinguished hair, the strong elegant figure, the air of a retired Governor from the Colonies. He studied the woman who sat in his chair covertly: he thought he’d seen her somewhere, the mink coat, the overblown figure, the expensive dress. Her face was familiar but unnoted, like that of someone you pass every day at the same place. She was vulgar, she was cheerful, she was undoubtedly rich. He couldn’t think where he had met her.

  She caught Mr Chalfont’s eye and winked. He blushed, he was horrified, nothing of this sort had ever happened to him before; the porter was watching and Mr Chalfont felt scandal at his elbow, robbing him of his familiar restaurant, his last hunting ground, turning him perhaps out of Mayfair altogether into some bleak Paddington parlour where he couldn’t keep up the least appearance of gallantry. Am I so obvious, he thought, so obvious? He went hastily across to her before she could wink again. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘you must remember me. What a long time . . .’

  ‘Your face is familiar, dear,’ she said. ‘Have a cocktail.’

  ‘Well,’ Mr Chalfont said, ‘I should certainly not mind a sherry, Mrs – Mrs – I’ve quite forgotten your surname.’

  ‘You’re a sport,’ the woman said, ‘but Amy will do.’

  ‘Ah,’ Mr Chalfont said, ‘you are looking very well, Amy. It gives me much pleasure to see you sitting there again after all these – months – why, years it must be. The last time we met . . .’

  ‘I don’t remember you clearly, dear, though of course when I saw you looking at me . . . I suppose it was in Jermyn Street.’

  ‘Jermyn Street,’ Mr Chalfont said. ‘Surely not Jermyn Street. I’ve never . . . Surely it must have been when I had my flat in Curzon Street. Delectable evenings one had there. I’ve moved since then to a rather humbler abode where I wouldn’t dream of inviting you . . . But perhaps we could slip away to some little nest of your own. Your health, my dear. You look younger than ever.’

  ‘Happy days,’ Amy said. Mr Chalfont winced. She fingered her mink coat. ‘But you know – I’ve retired.’

  ‘Ah, lost money, eh,’ Mr Chalfont said. ‘Dear lady, I’ve suffered in that way too. We must console each other a little. I suppose business is bad. Your husband – I seem to recall a trying man who did his best to interfere with our idyll. It was quite an idyll, wasn’t it, those evenings in Curzon Street?’

  ‘You’ve got it wrong, dear. I never was in Curzon Street. But if you date back to the time I tried that husband racket, why that goes years back, to the mews off Bond Street. Fancy your remembering. It was wrong of me. I can see that now. And it never really worked. I don’t think he looked like a husband. But now I’ve retired. Oh, no,’ she said, leaning forward until he could smell the brandy on her plump little lips, ‘I haven’t lost money; I’ve made it.’

  ‘You’re lucky,’ Mr Chalfont said.

  ‘It was all the Jubilee,’ Amy explained.

  ‘I was confined to my bed during the Jubilee,’ Mr Chalfont said. ‘I understand it all went off very well.’

  ‘It was lovely,’ Amy said. ‘Why, I said to myself, everyone ought to do something to make it a success. So I cleaned up the streets.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand,’ Mr Chalfont said. ‘You mean the decorations?’

  ‘No, no,’ Amy said, ‘that wasn’t it at all. But it didn’t seem to me nice, when all these Colonials were in London, for them to see the girls in Bond Street and Wardour Street and all over the place. I’m proud of London, and it didn’t seem right to me that we should get a reputation.’

  ‘People must live.’

  ‘Of course they must live. Wasn’t I in the business myself, dear?’

  ‘Oh,’ Mr Chalfont said, ‘you were in the business?’ It was quite a shock to him; he looked quickly this way and that, fearing that he might have been observed.

  ‘So you see I opened a House and split with the girls. I took all the risk, and then of course I had my other expenses. I had to advertise.’

  ‘How did you – how did you get it known?’ He couldn’t help having a kind of professional interest.

  ‘Easy, dear. I opened a tourist bureau. Trips to the London underworld. Limehouse and all that. But there was always an old fellow who wanted the guide to show him something privately afterwards.’

  ‘Very ingenious,’ Mr Chalfont said.

  ‘And loyal too, dear. It cleaned up the streets properly. Though of course I only took the best. I was very select. Some of them jibbed, because they said they did all the work, but as I said to them, it was My Idea.’

  ‘So now you’re retired?’

  ‘I made five thousand pounds, dear. It was really my jubilee as well, though you mightn’t think it to look at me. I always had the makings of a business woman, and I saw, you see, how I could extend the business. I opened at Brighton too. I cleaned up England in a way of speaking. It was ever so much nicer for the Colonials. There’s been a lot of money in the country these last weeks. Have another sherry, dear, you are looking poorly.’

  ‘Really, really you know I ought to be going.’

  ‘Oh, come on. It’s Jubilee, isn’t it? Celebrate. Be a sport.’

  ‘I think I see a friend.’

  He looked helplessly around: a friend: he couldn’t even think of a friend’s name. He wilted before a personality stronger than his own. She bloomed there like a great dressy autumn flower. He felt old: my jubilee. His frayed cuffs showed; he had forgotten to arrange his hand. He said, ‘Perhaps. Just one. It ought really to be on me,’ and as he watched her bang for the waiter in the dim genteel place and dominate his disapproval when he came, Mr Chalfont couldn’t help wondering at the unfairness of her confidence and her health. He had a touch of neuritis, but she was carnival; she really seemed to belong to the banners and drinks and plumes and processions. He said quite humbly, ‘I should like to have seen the procession, but I wasn’t up to it. My rheumatism,’ he excused himself. His little withered sense of good taste could not stand the bright plebeian spontaneity. He was a fine dancer, but they’d have outdanced him on the pavements; he made love attractively in his formal well-bred way, but they’d have outloved him, blind and drunk and crazy and happy in the park. He had known that he would be out of place, he’d kept away; but it was humiliating to realize that Amy had missed nothing.

  ‘You look properly done, dear,’ Amy said. ‘Let me lend you a couple of quid.’

  ‘No, no,’ Mr Chalfont said. ‘Really I couldn’t.’

  ‘I expect you’ve given me plenty in your time.’

  But had he? He couldn’t remember her; it was such a long time since he’d been with a woman except in the way of business. He said, ‘I couldn’t. I really couldn’t.’ He tried to explain his attitude while she fumbled in her bag.

  ‘I never take money – except, you know, from friends.’ He admitted desperately, ‘or except in business.’ But he couldn’t take his eyes away. He was broke and it was cruel of her to show him a five-pound note. ‘No. Really.’ It was a long time since his market price had been as high as five pounds.

  ‘I know how it is, dear,’ Amy said, ‘I’ve been in the business myself, and I know just how you feel. Sometimes a gentleman would come home with me, give me a quid and run away as if he was scared. It was insulting. I never did like taking money for nothing.’

  ‘But you’re quite wrong,’ Mr Chalfont said. ‘That’s not it at all. Not it at all.’

  ‘Why, I could tell almost as soon as you spoke to me. You don’t need to keep up pretences with me, dear,’ Amy went inexorably on, while Mayfair faded from his manner until there remained only the bed-sitting room, the ham rolls, the iron heating on the stove. ‘You don’t need to be proud. But if you’d rather (it’s all the same to me, it doesn’t mean a thing to me) we’ll go home, and let you do your stuff. It’s all the same to me, dear, but if you’d rather – I know how you feel,’ and presently they went
out together arm-in-arm into the decorated desolate street.

  ‘Cheer up, dear,’ Amy said, as the wind picked up the ribbons and tore them from the poles and lifted the dust and made the banners flap, ‘a girl likes a cheerful face.’ And suddenly she became raucous and merry, slapping Mr Chalfont on his back, pinching his arm, saying, ‘Let’s have a little Jubilee spirit, dear,’ taking her revenge for a world of uncongenial partners on old Mr Chalfont. You couldn’t call him anything else now but old Mr Chalfont.

  1936

  A DAY SAVED

  I HAD stuck closely to him, as people say like a shadow. But that’s absurd. I’m no shadow. You can feel me, touch me, hear me, smell me. I’m Robinson. But I had sat at the next table, followed twenty yards behind down every street, when he went upstairs I waited at the bottom, and when he came down I passed out before him and paused at the first corner. In that way I was really like a shadow, for sometimes I was in front of him and sometimes I was behind him.

  Who was he? I never knew his name. He was short and ordinary in appearance and he carried an umbrella; his hat was a bowler, and he wore brown gloves. But this was his importance to me: he carried something I dearly, despairingly wanted. It was beneath his clothes, perhaps in a pouch, a purse, perhaps dangling next to his skin. Who knows how cunning the most ordinary man can be? Surgeons can make clever insertions. He may have carried it even closer to his heart than the outer skin.

  What was it? I never knew. I can only guess, as I might guess at his name, calling him Jones or Douglas, Wales, Canby, Fotheringay. Once in a restaurant I said ‘Fotheringay’ softly to my soup and I thought he looked up and round about him. I don’t know. This is the horror I cannot escape: knowing nothing, his name, what it was he carried, why I wanted it so, why I followed him.

  Presently we came to a railway bridge and underneath it he met a friend. I am using words again very inexactly. Bear with me. I try to be exact. I pray to be exact. All I want in the world is to know. So when I say he met a friend, I do not know that it was a friend, I know only that it was someone he greeted with apparent affection. The friend said to him, ‘When do you leave?’ He said, ‘At two from Dover.’ You may be sure I felt my pocket to make sure the ticket was there.

  Then his friend said, ‘If you fly you will save a day.’

  He nodded, he agreed, he would sacrifice his ticket, he would save a day.

  I ask you, what does a day saved matter to him or to you? A day saved from what? for what? Instead of spending the day travelling, you will see your friend a day earlier, but you cannot stay indefinitely, you will travel home twenty-four hours sooner, that is all. But you will fly home and again save a day? Save it from what, for what? You will begin work a day earlier, but you cannot work on indefinitely. It only means that you will cease work a day earlier. And then, what? You cannot die a day earlier. So you will realize perhaps how rash it was of you to save a day, when you discover how you cannot escape those twenty-four hours you have so carefully preserved; you may push them forward and push them forward, but some time they must be spent, and then you may wish you had spent them as innocently as in the train from Ostend.

  But this thought never occurred to him. He said, ‘Yes, that’s true. It would save a day. I’ll fly.’ I nearly spoke to him then. The selfishness of the man. For that day which he thought he was saving might be his despair years later, but it was my despair at the instant. For I had been looking forward to the long train journey in the same compartment. It was winter, and the train would be nearly empty, and with the least luck we should be alone together. I had planned everything. I was going to talk to him. Because I knew nothing about him, I should begin in the usual way by asking whether he minded the window being raised a little or a little lowered. That would show him that we spoke the same language and he would probably be only too ready to talk, feeling himself in a foreign country; he would be grateful for any help I might be able to give him, translating this or that word.

  Of course I never believed that talk would be enough. I should learn a great deal about him, but I believed that I should have to kill him before I knew all. I should have killed him, I think, at night, between the two stations which are the farthest parted, after the customs had examined our luggage and our passports had been stamped at the frontier, and we had pulled down the blinds and turned out the light. I had even planned what to do with his body, with the bowler hat and the umbrella and the brown gloves, but only if it became necessary, only if in no other way he would yield what I wanted. I am a gentle creature, not easily roused.

  But now he had chosen to go by aeroplane and there was nothing that I could do. I followed him, of course, sat in the seat behind, watched his tremulousness at his first flight, how he avoided for a long while the sight of the sea below, how he kept his bowler hat upon his knees, how he gasped a little when the grey wing tilted up like the arm of a windmill to the sky and the houses were set on edge. There were times, I believe, when he regretted having saved a day.

  We got out of the aeroplane together and he had a small trouble with the customs. I translated for him. He looked at me curiously and said, ‘Thank you.’ He was – again I suggest that I know when all I mean is I assume by his manner and his conversation – stupid and good-natured, but I believe for a moment he suspected me, thought he had seen me somewhere, in a tube, in a bus, in a public baths, below the railway bridge, on how many stairways. I asked him the time. He said, ‘We put our clocks back an hour here,’ and beamed with an absurd pleasure because he had saved an hour as well as a day.

  I had a drink with him, several drinks with him. He was absurdly grateful for my help. I had beer with him at one place, gin at another, and at a third he insisted on my sharing a bottle of wine. We became for the time being friends. I felt more warmly towards him than towards any other man I have known, for, like love between a man and a woman, my affection was partly curiosity. I told him that I was Robinson; he meant to give me a card, but while he was looking for one he drank another glass of wine and forgot about it. We were both a little drunk. Presently I began to call him Fotheringay. He never contradicted me and it may have been his name, but I seem to remember also calling him Douglas, Wales and Canby without correction. He was very generous and I found it easy to talk with him; the stupid are often companionable. I told him that I was desperate and he offered me money. He could not understand what I wanted.

  I said, ‘You’ve saved a day. You can afford to come with me tonight to a place I know.’

  He said, ‘I have to take a train tonight.’ He told me the name of the town, and he was not surprised when I told him that I was coming too.

  We drank together all that evening and went to the station together. I was planning, if it became necessary, to kill him. I thought in all friendliness that perhaps after all I might save him from having saved a day. But it was a small local train; it crept from station to station, and at every station people got out of the train and other people got into the train. He insisted on travelling third class and the carriage was never empty. He could not speak a word of the language and he simply curled up in his corner and slept; it was I who remained awake and had to listen to the weary painful gossip, a servant speaking of her mistress, a peasant woman of the day’s market, a soldier of the Church, and a man who, I believe, was a tailor of adultery, wire-worms and the harvest of three years ago.

  It was two o’clock in the morning when we reached the end of our journey. I walked with him to the house where his friends lived. It was quite close to the station and I had not time to plan or carry out any plan. The garden gate was open and he asked me in. I said no. I would go to the hotel. He said his friends would be pleased to put me up for the remainder of the night, but I said no. The lights were on in a downstairs room and the curtains were not drawn. A man was asleep in a chair by a great stove and there were glasses on a tray, a decanter of whisky, two bottles of beer and a long thin bottle of Rhine wine. I stepped back and he went in and almost immediately
the room was full of people. I could see his welcome in their eyes and in their gestures. There was a woman in a dressing-grown and a girl who sat with thin knees drawn up to her chin and three men, two of them old. They did not draw the curtains, though he must surely have guessed that I was watching them. The garden was cold; the winter beds were furred with weeds. I laid my hand on some prickly bush. It was as if they gave a deliberate display of their unity and companionship. My friend – I call him my friend, but he was really no more than an acquaintance and was my friend only for so long as we both were drunk – sat in the middle of them all, and I could tell from the way his lips were moving that he was telling them many things which he had never told me. Once I thought I could detect from his lip movements, ‘I have saved a day.’ He looked stupid and good-natured and happy. I could not bear the sight for long. It was an impertinence to display himself like that to me. I have never ceased to pray from that moment that the day he saved may be retarded and retarded until eventually he suffers its eighty-six thousand four hundred seconds when he has the most desperate need, when he is following another as I followed him, closely as people say like a shadow, so that he has to stop, as I have had to stop, to reassure himself: you can smell me, you can touch me, you can hear me, I am not a shadow: I am Fotheringay, Wales, Canby, I am Robinson.

  1935

  I SPY

  CHARLIE STOWE waited until he heard his mother snore before he got out of bed. Even then he moved with caution and tiptoed to the window. The front of the house was irregular, so that it was possible to see a light burning in his mother’s room. But now all the windows were dark. A searchlight passed across the sky, lighting the banks of cloud and probing the dark deep spaces between, seeking enemy airships. The wind blew from the sea, and Charlie Stowe could hear behind his mother’s snores the beating of the waves. A draught through the cracks in the window-frame stirred his night-shirt. Charlie Stowe was frightened.